What I’m Reading #10

Come back on Wednesday when I will kick off my book release giveaway! In the meantime, here are some of the articles and posts that have caught my eye during the past few weeks:

From the Touching Home in China: in search of missing girlhoods project, essays from two Chinese adoptees on what spending time in their hometown meant to them at the Adoptive Families website.

Was Our Adoption A Mistake? – A very good essay on RainbowKids which looks at a difficult older child adoption. You can read the follow-up essay which details how a special need diagnosis was found which explained much of the difficult behavior.

China passes new rules to help protect the “left behind” children of migrant workers. We will have to wait and see if the regulations lead to positive changes, no change, or unintended consequences.

On the NHBO blog an honest look at adopting out of birth order titled A Baby Sister But Six Months Older. I added it to my post on adopting out of birth order. I’ve seen many people who have only a toddler at home asking about adopting an older toddler so I think this will be helpful for them to consider what it might look like.

The only official statistics I have been able to find on this are from the Donaldson Institute Study in 2013. They studied 271 children adopted from China, but not all were through the special need program. Of 105 children who were adopted with identified special needs through the special needs program, 32% of the children were diagnosed with an additional special need once home. 50% of the all children (this is sn and nsn programs both) had completely accurate medical information. Parents surveyed said that they experienced incomplete medical information, their child had an undiagnosed condition, their child was diagnosed in China with a medical issue they didn’t actually have, or that their child’s medical condition was more severe than indicated. Most parents indicated that they felt the issue was because of the poor quality of medical records. Translated medical records contained less detail or were less accurate than the original language records. Some parents indicated that poor medical care in China was the reason for the discrepancy between their child’s condition and diagnosis. A few parents felt that China had lied or been misleading in the reports they had been given.

These statistics might sound a little shocking but keep in mind that it is a small sample size. Additionally, they didn’t include the dates of the adoptions. The fact that half of the adoptees included were from the NSN program would indicate that the adoptions were from an older time period when the medical information given to adoptive parents was scant. It said that the most common diagnosis was “developmental delay” which I find completely understandable for those NSN girls adopted in the 90’s. The orphanage conditions were poor then and most came home an under a year of age having never spent much time out of a crib or chair. Undiagnosed conditions would include the “minor” medical conditions I mentioned above such as a heart murmur, scoliosis, or hearing loss from untreated repeat ear infections.

Definitely on the fluffier side, the LA Times has a short article on the Chinese habit of drinking hot water as a beverage. In my experience, they offer it to you on hot summer days as well as in Beijing in January!

Red Thread Advocates has a great post called Rejected which focuses on when a child strongly prefers one parent over the other. This is extremely common and something which I personally have experienced. Even knowing it is normal, it can be difficult to go through.

A photo essay in The Telegraph looking at the matriarchal Mosuo people who live in the foothills of the Himalayas, between Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.

Many Christian adoptive families have questions about the state of Christianity in China. This article from UCAnews gives an interesting perspective on how Chinese culture makes the situation more complex than we are aware of here in the US.

The BBC recently aired a series called Chinese New Year: The biggest celebration on earth. We really enjoyed watching this gorgeous documentary.